How do they handle fresh water? As Appendix B shows, fresh water = food

PAGE2002 completely ignores water. World3 counts water as a renewable resource and it models all renewables as one.

3.3.4 How do they handle rising costs of fertiliser due to rising costs of energy and thus falling of food production per capita?

PAGE2002 completely ignores fertiliser or energy costs. Its only concept of falling food production per capita is through the greenhouse effects.

World3 simply treats fertiliser as a non-renewable, thus ignoring manure. Most World3 scenarios have food per capita dropping severely.

3.3.5 How do they handle fundamental resources? Is energy, space and time conserved?

PAGE2002 allows for two types of substitution effect: (i) one of its three fixed mitigation technologies and (ii) a log-log learning curve applied to each. It assumes a rising cost of fossil fuels over time but not that our total dependence on them will change.

World3 does allow certain substitutions of larger amounts of non-renewables to gain more renewables.

Both conserve energy, time and space as nothing is gained for free. Most Economic models do not.

3.3.6 How do they handle overshoot? Do they accept logistic behaviour? How about the Hubbert curve?

PAGE2002 being stochastic doesn‟t exactly incorporate the notion of overshoot except as a probability that some limit will be exceeded – what happens thereafter is unknown (which is fair enough). It does accept logistic behaviour through its log-log response functions and a sort of Hubbert curve does emerge in its statistical outputs.

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World3 was designed specifically to demonstrate all kinds of overshoot as the authors gleefully cover over several pages. It therefore has logistic behaviour and Hubbert curves throughout.

3.3.7 Do they integrate the Jevons Paradox? How are the effects on welfare calculated?

PAGE2002 specifically incorporates the Jevons Paradox but assumes that human welfare is directly linked to consumption (and thus GDP). As covered before, unadjusted GDP is pretty useless for most of the world‟s population.

World3 also specifically incorporates the Jevons Paradox by assuming that non-renewables grow cheaper through time due to technological improvements and that that investment in improvement can be spurred by shortages – but this simply brings on collapse quicker.

World3 models welfare by a direct implementation of the UN‟s Human Welfare Index which is the average of life expectancy, education and consumption.

3.3.8 Does it take account of synergies?

This is something that I haven‟t covered yet in this paper, yet it seems highly important for calculating the cost of mitigation. Synergies are when you can reorganise a system‟s inputs in such a way as for them to gain off one another for “free” simply through better arrangement.

A simple example is tying a power plant‟s waste heat into a local town‟s heating system – the town is heated for “free”. Another example is that by investing more money when building a factory into slightly wider pipes, pumping costs can be halved or quartered throughout the life of the factory and thus saving many more times the initial investment. There are many more examples: Natural Capitalism (Hawkin, Lovins, & Lovins, 1999) is packed full of them taken from real-world industrial examples. Making a 2x improvement at sources plus a series of 2x improvements along the supply chain can generate a 40x efficiency improvement by the production of the finished good.

PAGE2002 does incorporate synergies after a fashion through their learning curve, but it‟s not a great fit. World3 also incorporates them after a fashion through their scenarios diverting much production into technological advances, but once again it‟s not a great fit.

All in all, neither model is particularly good in modelling the costs of mitigation. Neither is detailed enough in their physical model.

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3.3.9 Does it take account of ecosystem (and thus agricultural) collapse due to rapid warming?

PAGE2002 has a statistical probability of total collapse which increases in likelihood as the temperature rises. World3 has no concept of rising temperature, just increasing “pollution”

past whose tipping point collapse occurs.

I find neither approach particularly helpful given that any warming in such a short time period at all, even 1C, is too unpredictable and therefore risky to contemplate.

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Conclusion

I am going to be extremely blunt in this conclusion – I have reviewed many of the models beyond PAGE2002 and World3 including the IPCC ones and as shown at the end of Chapter 3, I find them quite primitive. In fact, I find them worryingly primitive considering where the hard science is pointing. As a trained computer engineer, I know there is no shortage of talent capable of generating far better quality models – sadly, they are tied up generating quant models for the finance industry in the City because that‟s where the money is (in fact, some friends of mine from there just retired after becoming burned out by the sixty hour weeks).

However before considering the technical nature of the models, we have a severe problem with the assumptions we are using before we design those models. As this paper has shown, there are substantial implicit assumptions in how we term worth in our Economics, and many of these are quite shocking.

For example, we know that welfare isn‟t correlated with consumption after US$15,000 (it becomes tied to relative consumption over your perceived peer group instead – Wilkinson, 2007). So why on Earth would Limits to Growth take as granted that consumption at present levels in developed countries should be stabilised across all citizens in the World? Or even worse, Stern takes as granted that consumption should continue to exponentially increase at historical rates which through compounding yields ridiculous levels within fifty years? Make no doubt of it – a huge majority of the human population‟s effective carbon emissions are generated by both the richest AND the poorest segments of the world population^xxxvi, so too much AND too little consumption by too many people is the main driver of climate change^xxxvii. Yet, the scientific advisor typically assumes that no politician will ever seriously accept trying to reduce people‟s consumption for their own good – despite that examples such as tobacco and car use stand contrary.

Another example is a simple moral one: the rich consistently tend to value poor people as of less worth than rich ones, and Western people as of more worth than those in developing nations. In Economics, we value people according to earning or consumption ability. In all cases, we only think a few decades ahead at most and pray to the great god of technological progress that some new fix will come in time to prevent catastrophe occurring as a consequence of our actions – when this has been a historical oddity only occurring very recently indeed. We see this most evident in Economic criticism of Stern‟s report because he

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didn‟t use a discount rate – which is even more morally repugnant considering that we then use this presumed magic of technological progress as a justification for a “do nothing”

attitude on the basis that future generations will be better equipped for it. I wonder, do any of these people ever consider that our predecessors living thirty years ago made the exact same cost-benefit analysis and thus shelved this problem onto us? If after the last thirty years of wondrous technological progress we are still not ready to act, then how can we genuinely expect people in the next thirty years time to be any different?

No, this is patheticness of the worst kind. This is weakness of will, the worst of the NIMBY^xxxviii syndrome, passing along the buck as we selfishly and self-destructively try to consume as much as possible now before we get caught out. We are like children, left alone in a sweetshop and despite feeling the nausea coming on, are desperate to consume more before we get caught and spanked for our misdemeanours.

More of the same is not going to stop climate change – it was more of the same which got us into this position to begin with. Limits to Growth is no better with its bleak assumptions of human nature –we aren‟t stupid, and we can limit our own growth if we so choose. Millions of chronically obese people make the decision every year to reduce their eating for their own good – we are sentient animals, capable of seeing the end of the train line coming and slowing down. By assuming the worst of us, we model the worst in us and of course we are then doomed.

No, it is only through transformation into a new & better form of ourselves which will save us. The West must lead the way – we got the World into this state (indeed, some 77% of excess greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere were generated by the West), and we have a moral duty & obligation to clean up after ourselves. Such a transformation would need to tackle the fundamental functioning of our education, health, sanitation, agricultural, financial, business, political, religious and psychological systems. The change need not be profound – as we know from non-linear dynamics, small changes spread widely can utterly transform a system, and for most of us daily life would be nearly identical to at present.

One thing is for sure – we have an unfortunate weakness with subjects outside our own discipline. Economics should have hard science realities built into its core, yet I have seen precious little reality intrude into Neo-Classical Economics – indeed, most of the progress seems to be being performed by Physicists in Econophysics which was never mentioned even

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once during my course here at St. Andrews. Indeed, a more pluralist Economics teaching would do wonders for our quality of graduate.

This is not to say that those in other academic disciplines are much better. I personally was stunned during the research for this paper about how much is definitely known, yet how little of that is modelled. I fully appreciate how overly complex models quickly become a mess of feedback loops, yet how many of these computer models reside as open source software on a publicly accessible website such as sourceforge? If the IPCC is serious about getting some more complex & representative models together (e.g.; like the models used for weather forecasting), why doesn‟t it get experienced computer programmers to sort out the complexities for it? Why not put these models into an easily downloadable program which people can tinker with on their own home computers? This has been done with protein folding via the Stanford@Home project and indeed searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence so it‟s not without precedent. I worry that some of these researchers have too much to lose from letting outsiders muck around with their work, and preventing climate change will not be helped by partisan academic pride.

Lastly, in my opinion the modelling of the costs of mitigating climate change lies in a lamentable state and I see very little chance for any substantial improvement any time soon. If we still aren‟t precisely sure what is heating up the planet and how, costing a mitigation strategy seems rather far off. I personally find it interesting that anyone is bothering at all given current knowledge, but sadly our value system ascribes little value unless it is in money terms – witness the furore after all when Robert Costanza ascribed a US$33tn value to the top seventeen ecosystem services ten years ago (Costanza, et al., 1997). One thing which both Stern and Limits to Growth did achieve was getting people‟s attention (even if Stern‟s 20% of GDP with a 2C rise was laughably low once considering the known agricultural effects of such a quick & large rise). It was for that reason I chose those two climate change models in particular, and I am very glad to now know so much more about their details.

I hope you enjoyed reading these details as well, and thank you for reading them.

Niall Douglas

Monday 28^th April 2008

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Appendix A: Top twenty six causes of Worldwide loss of DALYs

One fifth of world loss of DALYs is due to lack of good food (World Health Organisation, 2002):

Figure 14: World Loss of Disability Adjusted Life Years (total = 1.46bn) in year 2000 17%

Low fruit and vegetable intake (3%) Lack of contraception (3%) Physical inactivity (2%) Lead exposure (2%) Risk factors for injury (2%) Illicit drugs (1%)

Unsafe health care injections (1%) Childhood sexual abuse (1%) Urban air pollution (1%) Climate change (1%)

Noise Airborne particulates

Carcinogens Ergonomic stressors

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Appendix B: Correlation of Fresh Water and Crop Quantities for Selected Crops

Source: Rockström (2003)

Note how selective breeding has increased the maximum water requirement for many of these crops and thus the average water required per tonne of food. The lower end of the range

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Notes

i One could assume instead that the single most important Economic effect will be to the biosphere. That seems obvious of course, but it‟s a vastly bigger question than merely treating agricultural effects. James Lovelock has advocated in his books that we risk the death of the entire planet (Lovelock, 2007) but I can‟t see how he‟s being

i One could assume instead that the single most important Economic effect will be to the biosphere. That seems obvious of course, but it‟s a vastly bigger question than merely treating agricultural effects. James Lovelock has advocated in his books that we risk the death of the entire planet (Lovelock, 2007) but I can‟t see how he‟s being

Im Dokument ModellingtheCostsofClimateChangeanditsCostsofMitigation:AScientificApproach Douglas,NiallEdward MunichPersonalRePEcArchive (Seite 39-54)